NASA Benchmarks Power Mac G5

[Melaure]

Read the NASA test until the end ( http://members.cox.net/craig.hunter/g5/ ).

The Apps were not compiled for G5 but for G4 (monoproc) and without Altivec. With a G5 optimisation, the G5/2Ghz should match the P4/3.2 Ghz or even beat it by 20%. These tests consist only in floating point calculation.

In a second phase, they have done Vector Benchmarks. In this case the Altivec is used and their ratio Mflops/mhz had explosed !!!
There is no bench for P4 which does not have a vector unit and I'm sure that the result would have been very poor ...


The G5 rocks, believe it ! ;-)

[Melaure]

Well but look closely at what Nasa testers wrote :

Note that the higher level of optimization (-O2) and SSE/SSE2 options in the Portland compiler degraded Jet3D performance on the P4 system, and were therefore not used.

Again, note that the vector benchmark does not include P4 systems because the AltiVec instruction set is only available on G4 and G5 systems.  Consistent with earlier Jet3D tests, the vector version of Jet3D runs an order of magnitude faster than the scalar version (speedups of 10X-13X are typical).

It means that SSE 1 or 2 is degrading performances and that Altivec accelerate the performance by 10 to 13. It's remarquable, isn't it ?

We can really count on this wonderful G5 processor, especially with dev tools optimized !!! :-D